March 30, 1979 Gusto cover story: Creative Problem Solving

One of my quests in writing cover stories for Gusto was to explore Buffalo’s treasures and back in the late 1970s many of them were still overlooked. This one really drew me in. For five years, I spent a stimulating week in June at the annual Creative Problem Solving Institute at Buffalo State College. One year I got to lead a workshop session in how to apply journalistic principles to the problem solving process.

March 30, 1979

Problem Solving

One of the world centers for the study of creative problem solving is here in Buffalo. The problem is not everybody knows about it.
A few minutes with Robert E. Johnston Jr., director of Pro-Think Systems, 1371 Delaware Ave., and your mental muscles are already playing catch with the far-fetched.
“Suppose you want to develop a radio that would peel apples,” he proposes to illustrate a point about rating ideals on a scale from zero to 100. Up come the plusses and minuses. There’s convenience. There’s the expense. There’s the danger of getting cut. “You play with it,” he says, “till you come up with a solution that you like.”
Giving brain cells a workout is Johnston’s stock in trade. He does it with seminars on techniques of creative thinking. In April, he’ll be giving them in Cincinnati, New York City and Trinidad. Local clients have included the South Buffalo Community Development Association and the musicians of the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra.
Johnston is one of eight graduates of the world’s only advanced degree program in creative studies. It’s not in Princeton, N.J. It’s not in Paris. It’s not in Tibet. It’s at Buffalo State College. Johnston, a former collegiate student affairs administrator, moved here from Houston so he could enroll in the four-semester sequence, plunge into the world’s largest library on creativity and work with leaders in the field like Dr. Sidney J. Parnes, Dr. Ruth B. Noller and Angelo M. Biondi.
What made Buffalo the center for the study of creativity was the genius of an adopted Buffalonian, the late Alex F. Osborn. A co-founder of the leading advertising firm of Batten, Barton, Durstine and Osborn, he responded to Dr. J. P. Guilford’s famous 1950 speech about “education’s appalling neglect of creativity” by setting up the Creative Education Foundation here in 1954. The mind-stimulating techniques he developed within the ad agency have become the cornerstones of contemporary creativity theory.
Osborn identified the basic elements in the creative process. He also pioneered the concept of deferring judgment in order to open the floodgates of ideas. He explained it in his landmark 1953 book, “Applied Imagination.”
“You can think up almost twice as many good ideas (in the same length of time),” he wrote, “if you defer judgment until after you have created an adequate checklist of possible leads to solution. Quantity breeds quality: The more ideas you think up, the more likely you are to arrive at the potentially best leads to solution.”
Mental ability, he believed, could be improved through practicing these techniques. To demonstrate, he and Dr. Parnes tested their early students against students who had no training in creative problem solving. Students with training turned out to be 94 percent better at thinking up good ideas.
Osborn succeeded in demystifying the creative process. “All human beings, to a greater or lesser degree, possess the imaginative faculty,” he wrote. In 1963, he and Dr. Parnes arrived at a five-step method – fact-finding, problem-finding, idea-finding, solution-finding and acceptance-finding – which is now taught as the heart of Buff State’s Master of Science program in Creative Studies.
The techniques have been expanded and refined over the years. Now there are checklists, mindsweeps, lateral thinking, left and right hemispheres of the brain, forced metaphors and dozens of other approaches. Third semester of the program is devoted to an exercise called Synectics. The idea behind Synectics is to make the strange familiar via analysis, generalization and analogy and, in turn, to make the familiar strange by shaking it up and distorting it.
“The essence of creativity,” says Johnston, “is making new connections. There’s one common denominator in all of it – a period of suspended judgment that allows the flow of ideas. It’s like giving everybody permission to think.”
Among the other Creative Studies graduates is Suzanne B. Toomey, whose CREA Institute is centered in her book-filled office and apartment on Niagara Street. Former director of the Shaker Museum near Cleveland, her interest in creativity began with the 19th century religious cult’s inventiveness and culminated in her moving to Buffalo.
CREA’s programs, like Pro-Think Systems, include a section on mental-physical fitness, which Toomey herself practices as a Tai Chi student and an avid bicyclist. She also leads sessions for parents and singles, gives provocative lectures on the Shakers and this semester is showing University at Buffalo students how to overcome procrastination by using creative problem solving.
“It’s a give and take,” Toomey says. “We have things like confession time, where people own up and tell of some disastrous incident caused by their procrastination. It’s a guilt trip, being a procrastinator. What we do is have 30 seconds where we all feel guilty and then we put that away. I more of less guide them through a series of steps. I see it as kind of a first aid, but it’s not going to get at the underlying cause. One reason I can do this kind of workshop is that I’m a procrastinator and I’ve studied myself.”
Analyzing one’s own prospects is the first thing a Creative Studies graduate has to put his or her mind to, says Craig Kosinski, who zipped through the sequence in three semesters. He put his future in focus by drawing up a resume that was too good to refuse. He became an in-house problem-solver for Transcontinent Record Sales Inc. and is editor of its music magazine, the Vinyl Edition.
In the office of the Creative Education Foundation upstairs from Buff State’s campus security office, executive director Biondi foresees creativity becoming a major factor in industry and education – not overnight, but perhaps over the next 10 to 20 years.
“We’re trying for a replication of the program in San Diego,” he says. “We’re hoping centers like this would group throughout the United States. We don’t want this to be a fad, though, like the hula hoop. We want people to get a good sound hold in their minds.”
So far, creative education in Buffalo has grown as steadily as a bonsai plant. First it was a two-credit course given as part of retailing at UB in the ‘50s. It shifted crosstown to Buff State during the ‘60s and started the master’s degree program in 1975.
Currently, there are eight graduate students in the program, with 10 more due next fall. Classes are light on lecturing and heavy on participation. “It’s more the guide by the side instead of the sage of the stage,” Dr. Noller explains.
Second-year grad students help the instructors team-teach the first-year students and the undergraduates, who can take up to 14 hours of creative studies as liberal arts electives.
“It’s applicable to any type of problem in any program,” says Dr. Noller. “Our people come from all over. Of our graduate students, one’s from Washington, one’s from Colorado, one’s from Virginia and one’s from Wisconsin. We have an engineer who’s been working in industry and who commutes from Erie, Pa.”
Once a year the whole world of creativity converges on Buffalo for the annual Creative Problem-Solving Institute, which will observe its 25th anniversary this year during its June 24-29 session at Buff State. For one week (cost: $275 plus room and board), approximately 600 theorists and interested individuals from all walks of life will cultivate their creative potential in a series of intensive seminars. This year, for the first time, a special first-day program is offered for those who are uncertain about devoting a whole week to the process.
“This is a place where you can come up with a really kooky idea,” Biondi says, “and the person next to you helps you tone it down to where it’s workable. What happens is that it becomes an integral community. New relationships are formed. A lot of new businesses are started here. The one difficulty we have is that there’s a re-entry problem at the end of the week. People don’t want to leave.”
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IN THE PHOTO: Sidney J. Parnes and Ruth B. Noller.
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FOOTNOTE: These days the Creative Problem Solving Institute has a bright and comprehensive website and affiliated operations around the globe. It also continues to hold its annual conference in June, this year at Niagara University. Its parent organization, the Creative Education Foundation, now based in Massachusetts, offers fellowships in memory of Sidney J. Parnes, who died in 2013 and whose family continues to provide major support. Ruth B. Noller, who died in 2008, also is memorialized with grants for research into creativity.